scholarly journals Death Zones, Comfort Zones: Queering the Refugee Question

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-127 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eddie Bruce-Jones
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Legal Practice ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
Refugee Law ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
Civil And Political Rights ◽  
Constitutional Protections

Sexuality-based refugee claims constitute an expanding area of legal practice and scholarship. This expansion in the field of refugee law mirrors international efforts to address homophobia in various sites around the globe, and in legal terms, this has predominantly taken the form of rights-based protections, such as decriminalising same-sex sexual acts as a matter of civil and political rights. The strategies of addressing sex-, gender- and sexuality-based oppression in the context of free movement on one hand and constitutional protections on the other share a common set of tensions and dilemmas, and both risk re-inscribing fundamental aspects of the very violence that they each seek to address. This article asks what it might mean to “queer” refugee law, particularly in the context of its dynamic relationship with the discourse of decriminalisation. The article takes forward the centrality of sexual politics within the moral economy of migration regulation and attempts to approach it with the methodological impulse and transformative potential that “queer” suggests.

scholarly journals The Right to Perform Rescue at Sea: Jurisprudence and Drowning

2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 598-619
Author(s):  
Itamar Mann
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
International Criminal Law ◽  
Law Of The Sea ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Refugee Law ◽  
Civil And Political Rights ◽  
The Right ◽  
Accountability Gap

AbstractFraming largescale migrant drownings as violations of international law has so far not been a straightforward task. The failures of doing so, both in scholarship and in activism, have often revealed important limitations of international law, and a form of rightlessness that is hard-wired in it. Through an assessment of arguments about drowning, framed in the vocabularies of the right to life, refugee law, the law of the sea, and international criminal law, difficulties surrounding the notion of jurisdiction persist: The maritime space has often functioned as a kind of “legal black hole.” Considering such difficulties, this Article suggests that shifting the focus from migrant rights to the civil and political rights of volunteers coming to the rescue, may help in closing the accountability gap. It thus seeks to articulate and conceptualize a form of maritime civil disobedience among rescue volunteers, which may provide the link for eliminating migrant rightlessness at sea.

Exclusion Law and International Law: Sui Generis or Overlap?

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Rikhof
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Minority Rights ◽  
Crimes Against Humanity ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Refugee Status ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Refugee Law ◽  
Criminal Background ◽  
The Status ◽  
Civil And Political Rights

There exists a strong synergy between the regulation at the international level of minority rights, asylum and criminal prosecutions of violations of human rights. The aspirations of minorities as a human right are recognised in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights while the violation of such a right can confer on a victim the status of refugee in a third country. As well, persons who are responsible for causing very serious disruptions to the rights of minorities and other groups can be brought to justice for the commission of genocide and crimes against humanity, particularly persecution. While in general there has been a clear distinction between the granting of asylum or refugee status to victims of persecution one hand and the prosecution of perpetrators of persecution on the other, these two notions have been brought together into the concept of exclusion in order to address the phenomenon of persons with a criminal background being part of the refugee stream arriving in a third country. Exclusion is an essential part of refugee law to ensure that persons who have committed criminal acts will not benefit from the benefits set out in the Refugee Convention. This article will discuss the parameters of exclusion as determined by the jurisprudence in six countries in North America and Europe where this issue has been at the forefront in the last decade.

Sexual Politics and Feminist Science

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten Leng
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Biases ◽  
Full Range ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Transformative Potential ◽  
The Status ◽  
German Speaking ◽  
And Gender

Sexual Politics and Feminist Science examines German-speaking women’s heretofore-neglected contributions to the rethinking of sex, gender, and sexuality taking place within sexology between 1900 and 1933. At a time when sex and gender were sites of intense political contestation, women engaged with new medico-scientific paradigms for understanding sex in order to theorize bodies, drives, and desires in ways that challenged the status quo, refuted misogynistic scientific pronouncements, and imagined new possibilities for gendered and sexual subjectivities. While pointing out sexology’s empowering feminist potential, Sexual Politics and Feminist Science also explores the ways in which women’s efforts to understand sex through science were laced with cognitive biases and sociological prejudices that ultimately circumscribed the transformative potential of their ideas. Sexual Politics and Feminist Science thus seeks to excavate the full range of sexology’s discursive effects and contend with the complex legacy of women’s scientized sexual theories.

The Integral Nature of Ethnicity and Religion during Northern Ireland’s Troubles

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 9-18
Author(s):  
Peter Crowley
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Religious Conflicts ◽  
The World ◽  
Sectarian Conflict ◽  
Civil And Political Rights ◽  
Religious Other

Northern Ireland’s Troubles conflict, like many complex conflicts through the world, has often been conceived as considerably motivated by religious differences. This paper demonstrates that religion was often integrated into an ethno-religious identity that fueled sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland during the Troubles period. Instead of being a religious-based conflict, the conflict derived from historical divides of power, land ownership, and civil and political rights in Ireland over several centuries. It relies on 12 interviews, six Protestants and six Catholics, to measure their use of religious references when referring to their religious other. The paper concludes that in the overwhelming majority of cases, both groups did not use religious references, supporting the hypothesis on the integrated nature of ethnicity and religion during the Troubles. It offers grounding for looking into the complex nature of sectarian and seemingly religious conflicts throughout the world, including cases in which religion acts as more of a veneer to deeply rooted identities and historical narratives.

Influence of the ICCPR in Asia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yogesh Tyagi
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Judicial Discourse ◽  
International Human ◽  
Golden Jubilee ◽  
Civil And Political Rights ◽  
The Impact

The golden jubilee of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) coincides with the emergence of Asia as a centre of global attention. However, greater attention to Asia has been accompanied by some scepticism over its attitude towards human rights. The chapter provides an overall assessment of the impact of the ICCPR on the major Asian States, with an analysis of the factors affecting such influence. The chapter considers the involvement in, observance of, and compliance with the provisions of the ICCPR by these States. It further delves into the academic and judicial discourse on the ICCPR within these States, recording the domestic disposition towards judgments of foreign courts, the output of the Human Rights Committee, and the work of other international human rights bodies. It makes suggestions for developing mechanisms to improve the effectiveness of the ICCPR and for creating databases to perform further research in the area.

Influence of the ICCPR in the Middle East

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Başak Çali
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Reporting Practices ◽  
Rights Protection ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
East Region ◽  
Civil And Political Rights ◽  
State Responses

This chapter surveys the legal influence of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) on the domestic laws of States in the Middle East region. It analyses ratification, reservation, and reporting practices, the domestic legal status of the ICCPR, and State responses to the Human Rights Committee’s concluding observations. The chapter argues that the ICCPR’s legal influence in the region is structurally hampered due to its lack of authoritative legal status and the dominance of defensive domestic legalism. A significant gap remains between the HRC’s vision of civil and political rights protection grounded in the entrenchment of liberal, democratic, and multicultural laws and the region’s authoritarian or majoritarian political structures that foreground security and treat non-majority identities as threats. The influence of the ICCPR on domestic laws in the Middle East remains a long-term battle, whereby small gains under limited legal opportunity structures remain the overarching norm.

The Economic and Political Determinants of Human (Including Health) Rights

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vicente Navarro
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Individual Property ◽  
Socioeconomic Rights ◽  
Civil And Political Rights ◽  
Fair Wages ◽  
The Right ◽  
The U.S

This paper presents an analysis and critique of the U.S. government's current emphasis on human rights; and (a) its limited focus on only some civil and political components of the original U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, and (b) its disregard for economic and social rights such as the rights to work, fair wages, health, education, and social security. The paper discusses the reasons for that limited focus and argues that, contrary to what is widely presented in the media and academe: (1) civil and political rights are highly restricted in the U.S.; (2) those rights are further restricted in the U.S. when analyzed in their social and economic dimensions; (3) civil and political rights are not independent of but rather intrinsically related to and dependent on the existence of socioeconomic rights; (4) the definition of the nature and extension of human rights in their civil, political, social, and economic dimensions is not universal, but rather depends on the pattern of economic and political power relations particular to each society; and (5) the pattern of power relations in the U.S. society and the western system of power, based on the right to individual property and its concomitant class structure and relations, is incompatible with the full realization of human rights in their economic, social, political, and civil dimensions. This paper further indicates that U.S. financial and corporate capital, through its overwhelming influence over the organs of political power in the U.S. and over international bodies and agencies, is primarily responsible for the denial of the human rights of the U.S. population and many populations throughout the world as well.

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